I’m so pleased that I’ve managed to recruit Scott Jordan Harris, editor of The Big Picture, to help me cover cinema. Scott is very knowledgeable and a great writer but most importantly he’s a very cool guy.  Scott, along with other film biz friends, writers & assorted  film nuts, are going to be taking part in a regular series of posts in which we describe why a famous film scene works so well

Over to Scott:

Here is perhaps the most celebrated song and dance scene in G.P. Shippy’s “Sholay“, perhaps the most celebrated movie in Bollywood’s history. The song, ‘Mehbooba Mehbooba’ by R.D. Burman, is lyrically limited (‘Beloved, oh, beloved / Roses bloom in gardens / When we meet in the desert’…*) but rhythmically inspired. The dance is an ideal accompaniment, the ever-escalating excitement of the music’s beat exquisitely embodied by the artful undulations of Helen’s magnificent midriff, as her nameless character gyrates for the pleasure of Amjad Khan’s reclining dacoit Gabbar Singh.

The scene is astonishingly sexual. The obvious and aforementioned excitement expressed by the music, that midriff, and the dancing conceals a subtler sexual dynamic: the setting, Singh’s encampment of criminals, stands as a demonstration of his potency, but it is the rivals to his hyper-masculine dominancy – our heroes Jai (Amitabh Bachchan) and Veeru (Dharmendra) who, unseen by him but glimpsed by us, are silently planting explosives – who will hijack proceedings with a daring display of machismo. The symbolism of the climactic, upward explosion they unleash need not be described.

‘Mehhbooba Mehbooba’ is a musical interlude that is not only comic, joyous and arousing but also one that intensifies tension as expertly as any scene in Hitchcock. And aside from all that it is, incidentally, one of the finest song and dance sequences in cinema.

*If this sample is insufficient, the scene can be viewed with subtitles, but without the crucial explosion, here.